Who was Richard Hamilton | The White Album Project The White Album Project British pop artist Richard Hamilton landed the job via mutual friend, gallery owner Robert Fraser Richard Hamilton in a photograph taken around 1970 Richard Hamilton was born April 24 1922, and died September 13 2011 in England at age 89. A British painter and collage artist whose art collages of the 1950s directly inspired Sir Peter Blake, who created the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper cover. He has been called the “Father of Pop Art”, and was the artistic genius behind the Beatles’ iconic White Album package design. He was closely associated with the Swinging London of the 1960s. One of his well-known paintings depicted Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser handcuffed together in the back of a police car. As a teacher, one of his art students was Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music. Hamilton is often credited as one of the original pop artists, as well as the coiner of the phrase. For his design of the blank White Album cover and the collage-style poster inside, Hamilton claimed to have been paid the equivalent of just $316.

Hamilton’s 1956 collage titled ‘Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, produced for the This is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by some critics and historians to be the first work of Pop Art. The piece has all the human senses cast in various modes; the purpose of the picture was to “provoke acute awareness of the sensory functions in an environmental situation”. Born into a working class family, Richard Hamilton grew up in the Pimlico area of London. Having left school with no formal qualifications Hamilton got work as an apprentice working at an electrical components firm. Here he discovered an ability for draftsmanship and began to do painting at evening classes at St. Martin’s School of Art which eventually lead to his entry into the Royal Academy Schools. After spending the war working as a technical draftsman he re-enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools but was later expelled. After two years at the Slade School of Art Richard Hamilton began exhibiting at the ICA where he also produced posters and leaflets and teaching at the Central School of Art and Design where he became a lifelong friend with Eduardo Paolozzi. Hamilton and Paolozzi formed the Independent Group based at the ICA.

Other members of that group included the painter Magda Cordell, the photographer Nigel Henderson, the architects Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, the art critics Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham and Toni del Renzio. Pop Art should be popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and big business ~ Richard Hamilton In 1952 through Roland Penrose, who Hamilton had met at the ICA, he was intoduced to the Green Box notes of Marcel Duchamp. It was also through Penrose that Hamilton met Victor Passmore who gave him a teaching post based in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne which lasted to 1966. The post afforded Hamilton the time to further his research on Duchamp which resulted in the publication of a typographic version of Duchamp’s Green Box in 1960. Hamilton’s 1955 exhibition of paintings at the Hanover Gallery were all in some form a homage to Duchamp. In the same year Hamilton organised the exhibition Man Machine Motion at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle.

Designed to look more like an advertising display than a conventional art exhibit the show prefigured Hamilton’s contribution to This is Tomorrow the following year. The success of This is Tomorrow secured Hamilton further teaching assignments in particular at the Royal College of Art from 1957-61 where he promoted David Hockney and Peter Blake. During this period Hamilton was also very active in CND. In the early 1960s he received a grant from the Arts Council to investigate the condition of the Kurt Schwitters ‘Mertzbarn’ in Cumbria. The research eventually resulted in Hamilton organising the preservation of the work by relocating it to the Hatton Gallery. In 1962 his first wife Terry was killed in a car crash and, in part to recover from this, he travelled for the first time to America where, as well as meeting other leading Pop Artist, he was befriended by Marcel Duchamp. Arising from this Hamilton curated the first and to date only British retrospective of Duchamp’s work which also required Hamilton to make copies of The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Batchelors, Even and other glass works too fragile to travel. The exhibition was shown at the Tate Gallery in 1966.

From the mid-1960s Hamilton was represented by Robert Fraser at the Indica Gallery and even produced a series of prints Swinging London based on Fraser’s arrest with Mick Jagger for possesion of drugs. This association with the 1960s Pop Music scene continued as Hamilton became friends with Paul McCartney resulting in him producing the collage for the inside of the White Album. Hamilton had also been the teacher of Bryan Ferry and Nick de Ville in Newcastle a few years before and his influence can be found in the visual styling and approach of Roxy Music. Richard Hamilton in a photo taken in London in the late 1960's During the 1970s Richard Hamilton enjoyed international acclaim with a number of major exhibitions being organised of his work. Hamilton had found a new companion in the painter Rita Donnagh and together they set about converting North End a farm in the Oxfordshire countryside into a home and studios. Hamilton realised a series of projects that blurred the boundaries between artwork and product design including a painting that incorporated a state-of-the-art radio receiver and the casing of a Diab Computer.

In 1977-8 Hamilton undertook a series of collaborations with the artist Dieter Roth that also blurred the definitions of the artist as sole author of his work. From the late 1940s Richard Hamilton has been engaged with a project to produce a suite of illustrations for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Associated with this in 1981 began work on a trilogy of paintings based on the conflicts in Northern Ireland after watching a television documentary about the protest organised by IRA prisoners in Longcech Prison — more popularly known as The Maze. The Citizen 1981-3 shows a dirty protester with long hair and a beard stylised in a way to make him appear similar to a Christian martyr. The Subject 1988-9 shows an Orangeman, a member of the order dedicated to defend Unionism in Northern Ireland. The State 1993 shows a British soldier on a solitary patrol on a street. Critical responses to the works have been divided with those both on the political left and right accusing Hamilton of naïveté.

During the 1980s Hamilton also voyaged into industrial design and designed two computer exteriors: OHIO computer prototype (for a Swedish firm named Isotron, 1984) and DIAB DS-101 (for Dataindustrier AB, 1986). Hamilton’s output of new work since 1993 has been limited. In 1992 the Tate Gallery in London organized a major retrospective of Hamilton’s career with an accompanying catalogue which provides the most comprehensive review of his career. In 1993 Hamilton represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Golden Lion. The Tate Gallery now has a comprehensive collection of Hamilton’s work from across his career. “Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? — R. Hamilton (1956) Search this site… Richard Hamilton | Beatles Blog Reply Sad news this past week that Richard Hamilton, the British artist who helped the Beatles design the minimalist cover and inserts (a large photo-collage poster and four individual photographs of the band) for their famous “The Beatles (White Album)” LP has died at the age of 89.

Released in 1968, no Beatles collection would be complete without it. Its simple plain white cover was the very antithesis of the one which immediately preceded it – the comparatively gaudy and colourful “Sgt Pepper”. I really don’t have to write much here as there is such a lot of good information on the web already about Richard Hamilton and the work he did on “The Beatles (White Album)”. In fact there’s one extensive website dedicated to just about everything you’d care to want to know about it, including a page on the design , and a page about Hamilton the artist himself. The Beatles Bible website also has a six-page article on the “White Album”. And the Guardian newspaper ran this obituary to Hamilton . Share this: Richard Hamilton - Telegraph Art Obituaries Richard Hamilton Richard Hamilton, who died on September 13 aged 89, was often described as the founder of Pop Art – much to his frustration.

Image 1 of 2 A detail from Richard Hamilton's 'Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?' Richard Hamilton Photo: DAVID BAILEY 6:24PM BST 13 Sep 2011 This was because, although he was the creator of iconic “Pop” images, and was the first artist to use the word in a painting, Hamilton exhibited a versatility which resisted easy definition . Whether working with “found objects”, or as painter, typographer, collagist, printmaker, graphic designer, digital image manipulator, screen printer, photographer, software programmer or computer builder, Hamilton was committed to exploring and blurring the boundaries of “high” and “low” culture even as they were refashioned by television, cinema and rock music. “My ambition was to be multi-allusive,” he once observed. “I wanted to get all of living into my work.” He articulated this inclusiveness in a famous letter he wrote in 1957, to the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, that became not only the definitive description of Pop Art, but also a charter for contemporary culture.

Modern art, he wrote, should be “Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low-cost, Mass-produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business.” This was not, as was sometimes assumed, a clarion call for “dumbing down”; rather it was a statement of intent, establishing the quintessence of contemporary art.

Related Articles Richard Larter 06 Oct 2014 His own work was appropriately ambitious, ranging across such eclectic pieces as a typographical reworking of his friend (and hero) Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box (1960); the cover of The Beatles’ so-called White Album (1968); Swingeing London ’67 (1968-69), a silk screen of the arrest of Mick Jagger and the art dealer Robert Fraser; Lux 50 (1979), a painting that doubled up as a radio receiver; The Transmogrifications of Bloom (1984), an etching inspired by James Joyce; and Diab DS-101 (1985-89), a computer he designed himself. Although one of the most influential British artists of the late 20th century, Hamilton was a modest man who claimed he merely reworked the ideas and rhythms of Duchamp, Joyce, Picasso, Van Eyck and Velasquez. Richard Hamilton was born in London on February 24 1922.

Determined to be an artist from an early age, he left elementary school in Pimlico at 15 and became an apprentice electrical engineer as he was too young to attend the Royal Academy School. Instead he attended evening classes at St Martin’s School of Art. At 16 he moved to the Royal Academy, but his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war. He became a jig and tool draughtsman, working alongside scientists and electrical engineers at EMI, where he developed a lifelong interest in technology. After the war he returned to the Royal Academy but was expelled for “not profiting from instruction” . He subsequently enrolled at the Slade , where he began illustrating Joyce’s Ulysses, a project which continued into the 1990s. After graduating he found work at the ICA, for which he produced leaflets and posters and curated exhibitions, including Growth and Form (1951), which studied morphology in nature, and Man, Machine and Motion (1955), an examination of the extensions man made to himself in order to adapt to his environment. Ever the engineer, Hamilton considered that “the need to cope with technology provokes great art”.

In 1953 he lectured at the Central School of Arts, where he met Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. He joined their Independent Group, a collective of writers, architects and artists who exhibited at the ICA. Paolozzi introduced him to Victor Pasmore, who gained Hamilton a lectureship at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. This allowed him time to pursue his fascination with Duchamp, and his 1955 exhibition at the Hanover Gallery was a homage to that modern master. The following year the Independent Group mounted This Is Tomorrow, a quasi-anthropological, partly ironic exhibition embracing the imagery of the embryonic mass media. In Hamilton’s words, the idea was to examine “our new visual environment — cinema, the jukebox, Marilyn Monroe, and comics — all these games with sound, optical illusion and imagery”. His own small, dense, prophetic work Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

not only introduced the word “pop” into art (emblazoned on the muscleman’s phallic lollipop) but also anticipated many of the key images of the genre: the television; the Warner Bros billboard; the comic poster (Lichtenstein); the packaged ham (Rosenquist); the Motel bed (Oldenburg); and the Ford logo — Hamilton’s obsession with car design and engineering culminated in Hommage à Chrysler (1957). This was Pop Art, but not populist art. Hamilton called it “a new landscape of secondary, filtered material” – sophisticated art to be devoured by a mass audience. The exhibition’s success gained him a teaching post at the Royal College of Art, where he influenced David Hockney and Peter Blake . He produced works such as Hers Is A Lush Situation (1958), in which automotive and female design are commingled; Pin-up (1961), with its mixed idioms, classical, modern, vulgar; and the sketchy, painterly collage-like rapture of $he (1962) – it was, he suggested, “a sieved reflection of the adman’s paraphrase of the consumer’s dream”.

In 1962 Hamilton’s first wife, Terry, was killed in a car crash. He moved to America, where he met and became friendly with Duchamp. This led him to curate a Duchamp retrospective at the Tate Gallery, for which he made exact copies of works such as The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even that were too fragile to travel. By the mid-Sixties Hamilton was the most important Pop artist working in Britain. His obsession with modern media and popular perception was evident in My Marilyn (1965), a collage of stills of the actress taken from a magazine after her death. Toaster (1967), a gesture towards minimalism, was a paean to the beauty of the Braun toaster, revealing the artist’s ongoing interest in consumer culture and modern design. Having switched dealers to Robert Fraser, he was perfectly placed to capture Fraser’s and Mick Jagger’s arrest on drugs charges in a series of prints, ranging from Swingeing London 67 to The Release (1972). Echoing Andy Warhol’s technique of multiple reproductions, Hamilton revealed himself a sophisticated manipulator of the single image and mass media.

He had also become friendly with Paul McCartney, leading him to design the cover for the 1968 double album The Beatles (1968). The plain white sleeve led to its becoming known universally as “The White Album”. In the 1970s Hamilton moved to Oxfordshire with his companion and future second wife, the painter Rita Donagh. He continued to explore how complex combinations of painting and photographic techniques could blur boundaries of subject matter or style. He also enjoyed major retrospectives at the Tate (1970) and the Guggenheim in New York (1973), a museum he had painted and drawn in 1965. Both exhibitions subsequently toured Europe . Hamilton had always been politically engaged, vociferously supporting the CND. In the 1980s he began a “Northern Ireland” trilogy: The Citizen (1981-83) depicted a “dirty protest” prisoner in the Maze; The Subject (1988-89), a self-righteous Orangeman; and The State (1993), a British soldier on patrol. Inevitably such politicised subject matter attracted criticism, though many considered the works merely naive oversimplifications.

Despite his advancing years, Hamilton continued to reinvent himself. In the 1980s he began working with computers: “I initially ventured into working with computers because I didn’t want to get left behind. I was approaching old age and aware of it, and I thought 'I’m going to keep up with this’ and found out that I was ahead of everybody.” He designed two computers, the OHIO and the Diab DS-101, and increasingly used digital devices to manipulate images and create a dialogue between technique, technology and aesthetics. The attraction of computers, he claimed, was that “you have the possibility of perfection. I’m after beauty — of composition, colour and tone.” It did not seem ironic that a man in his eighth decade was exploring technology with greater vivacity than almost any other artist: throughout his long career, Hamilton’s work anticipated almost every interpretative cultural theory, from Marshall McLuhan to the “Young British Artists”, and provided the most thorough engagement with mass media and technology this side of the Atlantic. Damien Hirst referred to Hamilton as “the greatest”. Hamilton was appointed Companion of Honour in 2000; in 2006 he received the Max Beckmann Prize for Painting.

A major retrospective of his work is due to travel to tour America and Europe from 2013. Richard Hamilton married Terry O’Reilly in 1947; they had a son and a daughter. Rita Donagh, whom he married in 1991, survives him with the son of his first marriage. Pop art pioneer Richard Hamilton dies at the age of 89 - BBC News BBC News Pop art pioneer Richard Hamilton dies at the age of 89 13 September 2011 From the section Entertainment & Arts comments Read more about sharing. Close share panel Image caption Hamilton's 1956 collage Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? is one of his best known works British artist Richard Hamilton, regarded as a pioneer in the field of Pop art, has died at the age of 89 following a short illness. The London-born artist's best known work was a 1956 collage featuring a body builder and a tin of ham, which earned him the title "Father of Pop". The Gagosian Gallery, which announced his death, said the art world had "lost one of its leading lights".

He was working on a major retrospective just days before he died. The exhibition is due to be seen in London, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Madrid next year. Larry Gagosian, who owns several galleries around the world, said: "This is a very sad day for all of us and our thoughts are with Richard's family, particularly his wife Rita and son Rod." Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota said Hamilton died as he "would have wished", working on his art. In an interview with the BBC last year, Hamilton said: "I've always done exactly I wanted to do and I've always had the good fortune to do that." The artist was born in London in 1922, trained as an engineering draftsman and worked at EMI during World War II. He studied at London's Royal Academy but was expelled after defying the teacher's instructions. Image caption Richard Hamilton had a major exhibition in London last year Hamilton went on to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, leaving in 1951. A year later, Hamilton founded the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, with Eduardo Paolozzi, Lawrence Alloway and several other architects. This group helped to develop English Pop Art.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he also taught at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art, where he was an early supporter of David Hockney. Aside from his famous collages, Hamilton also designed the cover of the Beatles' White Album and poster in 1968. Hamilton's design is the only Beatles' album cover that does not show the four band members. The artist told how Sir Paul McCartney called him to ask him to design the new cover. Hamilton said: "Peter Blake's album sleeve (for Sgt Pepper) was crowded with people and very colourful. I thought it would be appropriate to present an album that was just white." 'Vulgar American imagery' During his career, Hamilton exhibited at some of the world's most famous art galleries, including the Tate in London and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His later work focused on political images, which often parodied post-war consumerism.

Serota said: "This fascination with the consumer society was highly critical, a moral position that was also evident in his distrust of the political establishment ranging from Mrs Thatcher to Tony Blair and Hugh Gaitskell." Shock and Awe (2007-08) featured Tony Blair wearing a cowboy shirt, with guns and holsters. Hamilton said he produced the image after he saw Blair "looking smug" following a conference with George Bush. In 2010, London's Serpentine Gallery exhibited Hamilton's Modern Moral Matters, which focused on his political and protest works. Asked recently about being called the father of Pop art, Hamilton said it was not a term he aligned himself with. "While I was interested in the pop phenomenon, I never associated myself with the term, which I used to describe Elvis Presley and rather vulgar American imagery of ice cream cones or hamburgers," he said.

"However, significant things were happening in the 1950s and it seemed not only to be a cool moment but a momentous moment for humanity." Beatles White Album Cover Designer Dies | Beatles Blog Beatles White Album Cover Designer Dies Posted on by beatlesblogger Sad news this past week that Richard Hamilton, the British artist who helped the Beatles design the minimalist cover and inserts (a large photo-collage poster and four individual photographs of the band) for their famous “The Beatles (White Album)” LP has died at the age of 89. Released in 1968, no Beatles collection would be complete without it. Its simple plain white cover was the very antithesis of the one which immediately preceded it – the comparatively gaudy and colourful “Sgt Pepper”. I really don’t have to write much here as there is such a lot of good information on the web already about Richard Hamilton and the work he did on “The Beatles (White Album)”. In fact there’s one extensive website dedicated to just about everything you’d care to want to know about it, including a page on the design , and a page about Hamilton the artist himself. The Beatles Bible website also has a six-page article on the “White Album”.

And the Guardian newspaper ran this obituary to Hamilton . Share this: Richard Hamilton | Masters & Contemporary Masters & Contemporary Born: 24 February 1922 London, England Died: 13 September 2013 London, England Nationality: English Education: Royal Academy, Slade School of Art, University College London Awards: World Print Council Award 1983, Britain representative Venice Biennale 1993 "Pop Art is: popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business" Richard Hamilton, 1957 Richard Hamilton grew up in the Pimlico area of London. Having left school with no formal qualifications Hamilton got work as an apprentice working at an electrical components firm. Here he discovered an ability for draughtsmanship and began to do painting at evening classes at St Martin's School of Art which eventually led to his entry into the Royal Academy Schools. After spending the war working as a technical draftsman he re-enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools but was later expelled on grounds of "not profiting from the instruction", loss of his student status forcing Hamilton to carry out National Service.

After two years at the Slade School of Art, University College, London, Richard Hamilton began exhibiting at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) where he also produced posters and leaflets and teaching at the Central School of Art and Design. Hamilton's early work was much influenced by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's 1913 text On Growth and Form. In 1952, at the first Independent Group meeting, held at the ICA, Hamilton was introduced to Eduardo Paolozzi's seminal presentation of collages produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s that are now considered to be the first standard bearers of Pop Art. Also in 1952, he was introduced to the Green Box notes of Marcel Duchamp through Roland Penrose, whom Hamilton had met at the ICA. At the ICA Hamilton was responsible for the design and installation of a number of exhibitions including one on James Joyce and The Wonder and the Horror of the Human Head that was curated by Penrose. It was also through Penrose that Hamilton met Victor Pasmore who gave him a teaching post based in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne which lasted until 1966.

Among the students Hamilton tutored at Newcastle in this period were Rita Donagh, Mark Lancaster, Tim Head, Roxy Music founder Bryan Ferry and Ferry's visual collaborator Nicholas De Ville. Hamilton's influence can be found in the visual styling and approach of Roxy Music. The post also afforded Hamilton the time to further his research on Duchamp, which resulted in the 1960 publication of a typographic version of Duchamp's Green Box, which comprised Duchamp's original notes for the design and construction of his famous work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass. Hamilton's 1955 exhibition of paintings at the Hanover Gallery were all in some form a homage to Duchamp. In the same year Hamilton organised the exhibition Man Machine Motion at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle. Designed to look more like an advertising display than a conventional art exhibit the show prefigured Hamilton's contribution to the This Is Tomorrow exhibition in London, at the Whitechapel Gallery the following year.

The work 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?' was created in 1956 for the catalogue of This Is Tomorrow, where it was reproduced in black and white and also used in posters for the exhibit. The success of This Is Tomorrow secured Hamilton further teaching assignments in particular at the Royal College of Art from 1957-61 where he promoted David Hockney and Peter Blake. During this period Hamilton was also very active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and produced a work parodying the then leader of the Labour Party Hugh Gaitskell for rejecting a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. In the early 1960s he received a grant from the Arts Council to investigate the condition of the Kurt Schwitters 'Merzbau' in Cumbria. The research eventually resulted in Hamilton organising the preservation of the work by relocating it to the Hatton Gallery in the Newcastle University. In 1962 his first wife Terry was killed in a car crash. In part to recover from this he travelled for the first time to the United States where, as well as meeting other leading Pop Artists, he was befriended by Marcel Duchamp.

Arising from this Hamilton curated the first and to date only British retrospective of Duchamp's work, and his familiarity with The Green Box enabled Hamilton to make copies of The Large Glass and other glass works too fragile to travel. The exhibition was shown at the Tate Gallery in 1966. From the mid-1960s, Hamilton was represented by Robert Fraser and even produced a series of prints entitled 'Swingeing London' based on Fraser's arrest along with Mick Jagger, for possession of drugs. This association with the 1960s Pop Music scene continued as Hamilton became friends with Paul McCartney, resulting in him producing the cover design and poster collage for the Beatles' White Album. During the 1970s, Richard Hamilton enjoyed international acclaim with a number of major exhibitions being organised of his work. Hamilton had found a new companion in the painter Rita Donagh and together they set about converting North End, a farm in the Oxfordshire countryside, into a home and studios. Hamilton realised a series of projects that blurred the boundaries between artwork and product design including a painting that incorporated a state-of-the-art radio receiver and the casing of a Diab Computer.

In 1977-8 Hamilton undertook a series of collaborations with the artist Dieter Roth that also blurred the definitions of the artist as sole author of their work. Since the late 1940s Richard Hamilton had been engaged with a project to produce a suite of illustrations for James Joyce's Ulysses. Associated with this, in 1981 Hamilton began work on a trilogy of paintings based on the conflicts in Northern Ireland after watching a television documentary about the protest organised by IRA prisoners in Long Kesh Prison, unofficially known as The Maze. The citizen (1981-3) shows IRA prisoner Bobby Sands from Belfast's Short Strand republican enclave. He is portrayed as Jesus, with long flowing hair and a beard. Republican prisoners had refused to wear prison uniforms, claiming that they were political prisoners. Prison officers refused to let "the blanket protesters" use the toilets unless they wore prison uniforms. The republican prisoners refused, and instead smeared the excrement on the wall of their cells. Hamilton explained (in the catalogue to his Tate Gallery exhibition, 1992), that he saw the image of "the blanket man as a public relations contrivance of enormous efficacy.

It had the moral conviction of a religious icon and the persuasiveness of the advertising man's dream soap commercial - yet it was a present reality". The subject (1988-9) shows an Orangeman, a member of an order dedicated to preserve Unionism in Northern Ireland. The state (1993) shows a British soldier undertaking solitary patrol on a street. Critical responses to the works have been divided with those both on the political left and right accusing Hamilton of naïveté. The citizen was first exhibited alongside an installation of Rita Donnagh's drawings about the Maze. During the 1980s Hamilton also voyaged into industrial design and designed two computer exteriors: OHIO computer prototype (for a Swedish firm named Isotron, 1984) and DIAB DS-101 (for Dataindustrier AB, 1986). As part of a television project Hamilton was introduced to the Quantel Paintbox and has since used this or similar devices to produce and modify his work. In 1992, the Tate Gallery in London organised a major retrospective of Hamilton's career with an accompanying catalogue which provides the most comprehensive review of his career.

In 1993 Hamilton represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Golden Lion. His definition of Pop Art from a letter to the Smithsons dated 16 January 1957 was - "Pop Art is: popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business" - stressing its everyday, commonplace values. Hamilton is also known as a prolific and groundbreaking printmaker. Since making his first print in 1939, his graphic work consistently pushed the boundaries of how prints and multiples are made. These works were shown by the Alan Cristea Gallery in London. In February 2002, the British Museum staged an exhibition of Hamilton's illustrations of James Joyce's Ulysses, entitled Imaging Ulysses. A book of Hamilton's illustrations was published simultaneously, with text by Stephen Coppel. In the book, Hamilton explained that the idea of illustrating this complex, experimental novel occurred to him when he was doing his National Service in 1947.

His first preliminary sketches were made while at the Slade School of Art, and he continued to refine and re-work the images over the next 50 years. Hamilton felt his re-working of the illustrations in many different media had produced a visual effect analogous to Joyce's verbal techniques. The Ulysses illustrations were subsequently exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. The British Museum exhibition coincided with both the 80th anniversary of the publication of Joyce's novel, and Richard Hamilton's 80th birthday. The Tate Gallery now has a comprehensive collection of Hamilton's work from across his career. Richard Hamilton: Pop Artist who designed The Beatles' White Album dies at 89 | Daily Mail Online comments British artist Richard Hamilton, who was regarded by many as the father of pop art, has died today aged 89. Hamilton created a string of renowned works throughout the sixties that inspired artists such as Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys. He had continued working on his latest pieces up until a few days before his death. It is not yet known how he died. 'Father of pop art': Richard Hamilton has died at the age of 89.

He pioneered the groundbreaking style of work in the 60s Friends and former colleagues have today paid tribute to Hamilton, calling his influence on art 'immeasurable'. 'This is a very sad day for all of us and our thoughts are with Richard's family, particularly his wife Rita and his son Rod,' art dealer and gallery owner Larry Gagosian said. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share A statement from the gallery called Hamilton the 'father of pop art' and a 'pioneering artist of unparalleled skill, invention and lasting authority.

Richard Hamilton's famous Swingeing London painting shows Rolling Stone Mick Jagger in the back of a police car in the late 60s Iconic: Hamilton's best known work, the 1956 collage 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?' 'His influence on subsequent generations of artists continues to be immeasurable.' Nicholas Serota, director of London's Tate gallery, added: 'Greatly admired by his peers, including (Andy) Warhol and (Joseph) Beuys, Hamilton produced a series of exquisite paintings, drawings, prints and multiples dealing with themes of glamour, consumption, commodity and popular culture.' Collage: The Citizen by Hamilton formed part of the Painting Of Modern Life exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in the 80s Popular: An art fan walks through Hamilton's 'Modern Moral Matters' Exhibition which was shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London Despite his age, Hamilton had been working until just a few days ago on a major museum retrospective of his work scheduled to travel to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, London and Madrid in 2013/14. Gagosian did not say how Hamilton died or where, although he was in Britain.

Pop art: One of Hamilton's more recent works, Shock and Awe Hamilton's best known work was his 1956 collage 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?', considered by some historians to mark the birth of the pop art movement. Hamilton is also credited with coining the phrase 'pop art' itself, in a note to some architects who were considering putting on an exhibition with him along similar lines to the 1956 'This Is Tomorrow' show. In words dating from 1957 that are seen as prescient of the likes of Warhol and, more recently, Damien Hirst, he wrote: 'Pop art is popular (designed for a mass audience), transient (short term solution), expendable (easily forgotten), low cost, mass produced, young (aimed at youth), witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business.' Hamilton is often associated with the swinging 60s, including for his painting of Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser in handcuffs following a drugs raid. He also designed the sleeve of the Beatles' 'White Album', consisting of a plain white sleeve with the band's name embossed on it.

Hamilton is remembered for his modesty and sense of humour as well as his artistic talent. Asked about people's perception of 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?', he said in a recent newspaper interview: 'I'm rather bored with it but it's a nice little earner!' Richard Hamilton, British Painter and a Creator of Pop Art, Dies at 89 - The New York Times The New York Times Art & Design |Richard Hamilton, British Painter and a Creator of Pop Art, Dies at 89 Search Continue reading the main story Richard Hamilton , a British painter and printmaker whose sly, trenchant take on consumer culture and advertising made him a pioneering figure in Pop Art, and who designed the cover of the Beatles’ “White Album,” died on Tuesday at his home near Oxford. He was 89. His death was confirmed by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work. In the grim, rationed Britain of the early 1950s, Mr. Hamilton joined a circle of fellow artists, critics and architects at the Institute of Contemporary Arts to discuss the place of new technology, advertising and mass culture in modern art.

When the Independent Group, as it was known, organized the groundbreaking exhibition “This Is Tomorrow” at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, Mr. Hamilton contributed a 10-inch-by-9-inch collage, “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” It became his most famous work, often referred to as the first example of Pop Art. Using images cut from mass-circulation magazines, the collage depicted a nude bodybuilder and a nude woman, posing alluringly on a sofa with a lampshade on her head, in a living room stocked with the goods and emblems of the postwar good life, American-style. A canned ham sits on an end table. A cover of Young Romance magazine is framed on the wall. The man holds a giant Tootsie Pop, with the word “Pop” occupying the center of the collage at eye level.

Photo Richard Hamilton Credit Photograph by David Bailey “Such was the success of this tiny and painstaking collocation that many people are still stuck with the idea of Hamilton as the man who single-handedly laid down the terms within which Pop Art was to operate,” the critic John Russell wrote in the catalog for a 1973 Hamilton retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Continue reading the main story With the stated mission of expressing, and critiquing, the essence of consumer culture, which he described as “popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business,” Mr. Hamilton went on to create many of the paintings that defined first-generation British Pop Art. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Notable among these were “ Hommage à Chrysler Corp. ,” in which the seductive curves of a car bumper and headlights blend with the ghostly image of a red-lipsticked Venus, and “She,” in which a toaster, vacuum cleaner, refrigerator and breasts float in a consumer dreamspace that Mr. Hamilton regarded with a certain ambivalence. “It looks as though the painting is a sardonic comment on our society,” Mr.

Hamilton wrote of “She” in Architectural Design. “But I would like to think of my purpose as a search for what is epic in everyday objects and attitudes.” Richard William Hamilton was born on Feb. 24, 1922, in London. After studying painting at Westminster Technical College and St. Martin’s School of Art, he went to work for the advertising department of a commercial studio. During World War II he worked as a jig and tool designer. Photo Richard Hamilton's “Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?” The 1956 collage is often referred to as the first example of Pop Art. Credit Richard Hamilton, Gagosian Gallery/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York After the war he returned to the Royal Academy, where he had studied briefly before the war, but he was expelled for “not profiting by instruction” and was drafted into the British Army. On completing his military service, he studied for three years at the Slade School of Art. Mr. Hamilton initially made his living by making models and designing art exhibitions. Later he taught design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and the University of Durham in Newcastle-on-Tyne.

An exhibition he organized at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1955, “Man, Machine and Motion,” signaled his fascination with modern technology and mass-produced images, toward which he adopted a critical but receptive stance. “If the artist is not to lose much of his ancient purpose, he may have to plunder the popular arts to recover the imagery which is his rightful inheritance,” he wrote in 1961. Unusually for a Pop artist, Mr. Hamilton made an overtly political statement with “Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland” (1964), merging a photograph of Claude Rains as the Phantom of the Opera with a newspaper photograph of Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, who, when the work was begun, had refused to support nuclear disarmament. Photo Mr. Hamilton's “Swingeing London,” which shows Robert Fraser, left, and Mick Jagger after their drug arrest in 1967. Credit Richard Hamilton, Gagosian Gallery/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Mr. Hamilton’s veneration for Duchamp, and the concept of the ready-made, helped determine the course of his art after the 1960s.

He manipulated found objects and photographs, putting his own spin on newspaper photographs, postcards and industrial objects — like the Braun electric toothbrush, which he topped with a set of candy teeth — as well as prints filtering the images of other artists. Advertisement Continue reading the main story He also produced a series of political paintings in the 1980s inspired by the troubles in Northern Ireland and the hunger strike of Bobby Sands. His dealer in the 1960s, the ultrahip Robert Fraser (also known as Groovy Bob), drew him into the vortex of the British pop-music world, reflected in the silkscreen-on-canvas series “Swingeing London,” depicting Mick Jagger and Mr. Fraser being driven away by the police after their 1967 drug arrest. During this period he met Paul McCartney, who hired him to design the cover for the Beatles’ next album. Surprisingly, Mr. Hamilton proposed an all-white jacket. “To avoid the issue of competing with the lavish design treatments of most jackets, I suggested a plain white cover so pure and reticent that it would seem to place it in the context of the most esoteric art publications,” Mr.

Hamilton told Rolling Stone in 1991. Photo Mr. Hamilton with a self-portrait at an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 2003. Credit Alberto Estevez/Agence France-Presse To reinforce the idea of a small-press production, he embossed “The Beatles” in one corner almost haphazardly and numbered each copy in a style that suggested a hand-numbering machine. Inside, he included a collage poster of private Beatles photos. In an interview with The Observer of London last year, he recalled that he had been paid 200 pounds for the assignment, adding, “I thought that was a bit mean.” Mr. Hamilton, who was the subject of retrospectives at the Tate Gallery in 1970 and 1992, worked intermittently for more than 50 years on a series of illustrations for James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” They were exhibited at the British Museum in 2002. His first wife, Terry O’Reilly, died in a car accident in 1962. He is survived by their son, Rod, and by his wife, Rita Donagh.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story At his death he was helping to organize a traveling exhibition of his work, which is scheduled to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in June 2013. A version of this article appears in print on September 14, 2011, on Page B19 of the New York edition with the headline: Richard Hamilton, British Painter And a Creator of Pop Art, Dies at 89. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Richard Hamilton Discography at Discogs Profile: English painter and collage artist, born 24 February 1922 in London, died 13 September 2011. His work "Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?", from 1956 is considered to have suggested to art historians the definition Pop Art (from the word Pop collaged in it).

Other famous works of his include his typographic version of Marcel Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even" published in 1960, "Swingeing London 67", a series of prints based on a newspaper photograph depicting Mick Jagger and (art dealer) Robert Fraser arrest for possession of drugs, and his cover design and poster for The Beatles' "White Album". A major retrospective of his career was hosted in 1992 by the Tate Gallery London, whereas in 1993 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. CH - Order of the Companions of Honour Sites: 'White Album' Sleeve Designer Dies at 89 - Rolling Stone 'White Album' Sleeve Designer Dies at 89 'White Album' Sleeve Designer Dies at 89 British artist Richard Hamilton often called the 'Father of Pop Art' Richard Hamilton around 1970 Credit: Tony Evans/Timelapse Library Ltd/Getty Richard Hamilton, the "Father of Pop Art" who designed the Beatles ' iconic White Album cover, died yesterday in England at age 89.

More News All Stories Hamilton's art collages of the 1950s directly inspired Sir Peter Blake, who created the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper cover. For his own design for the blank White Album cover and the collage-style poster inside, Hamilton claimed to have been paid the equivalent of $316. He was closely associated with the Swinging London of the 1960s. One of his well-known paintings depicted Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser handcuffed together in the back of a police car. As a teacher, one of his art students was Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music. Hamilton is often credited as one of the original pop artists, as well as the coiner of the phrase. Related

Question: Richard Hamilton, who died in September 2011, was famous for the design of the cover of which Beatles album?
Answer: 'The Beatles'